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| Chapter I. How the errors of later heretics have been condemned and refuted in the persons of their authors and originators.
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Chapter I.
How the errors of later heretics have been condemned and
refuted in the persons of their authors and originators.
As we began by setting
down in the first book some things by which we showed that our new
heretic is but an offshoot from ancient stocks of heresy, the due
condemnation of the earlier heretics ought to be enough to secure a
sentence of due condemnation for him. For as he has the same roots and
grows up out of the same fallow2385
| 2385 Scrobibus
(Petschenig): The text of Gazæus has enoribus. | he has
already been amply condemned in the persons of his predecessors,
especially as those who went wrong immediately before these men very
properly condemned the very thing which these men are now
asserting,2386
| 2386 The allusion is
to the recantation of Leporius and his companions. They were the
immediate predecessors of Nestorius, and Cassian means to say that
their recantation of their error ought to have been an example for
Nestorius to follow. | so that the
examples of their own party ought to be amply sufficient for them in
both directions; viz., that of those who were restored and that of
those who were condemned. For if they are capable of amendment they
have their remedy set forth in the correction of their own party. If
they are incapable of it they receive their sentence in the
condemnation
of their
own folk. But that we may not be thought to have prejudged the case
against them instead of fairly judging it, we will produce their actual
pestilent assertions, or rather I should say their blasphemous folly:
taking “above all the shield of faith, and the sword of the
Spirit which is the Word of God,”2387
that when the head of the old
serpent rises once more, the same sword of the Divine Word which
formerly severed it in the case of those ancient dragons may even now
cut it off in the persons of these new serpents. For since the error of
these is the same as that of those former ones, the decapitation of
those ought to be counted as the decapitation of these; and as the
serpents revive and emit pestilent blasts against the Lord’s
church, and cause some to fail through their hissing, we must on
account of these new diseases add a fresh remedy to those older cures,
so that even if what has already been done prove insufficient to
heal2388
| 2388
Curationem (Petschenig): Damnationem (Gazæus). | the malady, what we are now doing
may be adequate to restore those who are suffering from
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